ALMOST a year ago to the day I exposed a terrible scandal in which ordinary people lost their entire pension pots by investing in an alleged “ethical” wood plantation in faraway Costa Rica.

The one person who did rather well out of it all was Matthew Pickard, the man behind Ethical Forestry, who not only lives in a £4million house in Bournemouth but also trousered, with his two directors, £14.2million before his company went into liquidation.

My estimate is that 3,500 investors were wiped out in the racket, which encouraged the victims to cash in their pension pots because they were either too small or too far away. One chap lost £143,000.

Well, I have some good news. Although everything has been quiet for some time, the Serious Fraud Office, along with Dorset Police, has just raided three homes in Poole, Ferndown and Boscombe in relation to the company.

The directors of Ethical Forestry claimed investors would help reduce greenhouse gases by planting thousands of trees in Costa Rica, so it ticked the green box for the gullible — £18,000 would allegedly lead to an eventual return of £842,000. It was all b******s.

Crook Pickard lived in gated mansion on the hard earned money of others

Anybody who put money into Ethical Forestry should go on the SFO website today and register their story. I am assured it’s secure.

The firm that found the investors for Pickard and Co was an IFA called Avacade, based in Lymm, Cheshire. They received 30 per cent of any money they laid their hands on.

I gave them a big going over and instead of being grateful they hadn’t had their collars felt, they took me to the press regulator Ipso.

Have the father and son team of Craig and Lee Lummis, who run Avacade, had a knock at the door yet? I do hope so.

This was a massive scam and I look forward to those responsible getting sentences of ten years plus.

Zuma’s an insult to great Mandela

THE most upsetting experience in my rather sheltered life was visiting the prison cell which had been Nelson Mandela’s “home” for 18 years.

It was tiny. Literally 8ft x 7ft with a straw mat for a bed. How anybody could spend that much time in solitary without going quite mad or quite vengeful is beyond me. Mandela himself, the greatest of men, simply said he came out mature.

Clock forward almost three decades and instead of a great man running South Africa, they have a corrupt tyrant called Jacob Zuma as president who enriches his friends by handing them energy contracts and the like.

His latest wheeze is to draw fire from a report condemning his corruption by urging black politicians of all parties to pass a law forcing whites to hand over their land without compensation.

Were such a law to go through, I would like to see the same boycott that destroyed apartheid be applied to the Zuma regime.

Jacob Zuma booed at Nelson Mandela service

Self-employed in demand now

PHILIP HAMMOND has got it so wrong. It’s not the employees who are changing their working practices, it’s the bosses.

As I pointed out in this column some weeks ago, there was a fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal in which American companies made clear they do not wish to have huge payrolls any more.

They want to hire the self-employed. And who could blame them? They don’t get paid if they don’t turn up. Sickness among state sector employees is a scandal, double the private world and a multiple of the self-employed world.

The self-employed are “always on”. Companies can contact them without the fear they are interrupting family life. And the self-employed can always operate from home and thereby don’t take up valuable office space – especially in London, where you can pay £75 a square foot without turning round.

Plus firms don’t have to pay National Insurance if they don’t employ you. So the reality is that, even allowing for this shocking tax hike by Hammond, the self-employed army will continue to grow.

I know a PA/bookkeeper who works for a different client five days a week. She has more work than she knows what to do with. That’s the future.

The problem for companies is finding good people who want to be on their payroll.

Being a tabloid type I replied: “It will probably be next to you.” We continued the remainder of the lunch in silence. Just the two of us for a tortuous one hour.

That’s the kind of t***er he is. A grandstanding, ego-driven, mace-wielding, Westland-lying, drivel-talking, publicity loving, past-his-sell-by-date, tree-hugging charlatan. Not so much arbor but huge bore.

I do understand the sensitivities but I wonder how many times the Traveller Movement has apologised for the illegal camps its “members” have set up, including one recently on a school site where the kids had to be kept in their classes.

The Movement might like to start copying me in on their emails.

Uni students criticised for 'pikey' themed night out after wreaking havoc in Reading

Jamaic-ing me drive?

A FRIEND of mine’s parents were in Barbados recently and went to the big island cricket game against rivals Jamaica.

On the way out they decided to hail a local minibus and head back to their hotel. The bus was packed but before the couple could get on board the driver had a question for them.

He asked: “Have you been drinking?” They both said no, pointing out they had simply been watching the cricket.

That appeared to be good news for the driver, who said: “Well I have and this bus would be a lot safer if you drove it.”

And unbelievably he handed the keys to the wife, who then drove the bus, dropping off passengers on route at the instruction of the driver.

To me, what is unusual about this is not that the driver was drunk but that English tourists in Barbados were sober.

A spokesman said

I RECEIVED this rather nice pat on the back from column reader David Hamilton, who runs his own business in Croydon, South London: “I don’t wish to sound like an advert for A Spokesman Said but I have saved £1,000 on my car insurance.

“M&S increased my insurance despite having no claims. Funnily enough, I looked on other comparison sites, who would have saved me £600, but A Spokesman Said found me insurance with Allianz for £618.

Thanks for the heads-up.”

Glad to be of help, David, especially with this week’s Budget sticking an extra £109 a year on insurance premium tax.